Wild Places
Coastal paths are eroding faster than the maps admit
Cliff-top routes across Europe are being rerouted inland every year. The maps, the signage and the guidebooks are all lagging…
Teodor Braun
Contributing writer, Earth Worth Exploring
Teodor writes about mountain travel and the economics of small trailhead towns.
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15 articles
Trails & Routes
Navigating without a phone is a skill, not a nostalgia act
Battery dies, screens crack, signal disappears. Map and compass work is still the only navigation that fails gracefully.
Wild Places
Peat bogs store more carbon than forests, and almost nobody visits them
Blanket bog is the least photogenic landscape in Europe and among the most important. Here is what is actually happening underfoot.
Wild Places
Dark sky reserves are about lighting design, not remoteness
A place does not become dark by being far away. It becomes dark because somebody redesigned every streetlight within twenty…
Wild Places
Ancient woodland is not just old trees
The value of ancient woodland is in the soil, the ground flora and the fungal networks. None of it can be replanted.
Wild Places
Chalk streams are rarer than most people realise
A large majority of the world's chalk streams are in one country, and almost all of them are under pressure.
Wild Places
Machinery of a river: why straightened channels flood downstream
A century of straightening and dredging moved water faster, which moved the flooding to somebody else.
Wild Places
Seagrass meadows are the marine habitat nobody photographs
Underwater grassland stores carbon, stabilises sediment and nurses juvenile fish, and most of it has been lost.
Trails & Routes
Navigating in whiteout, when the ground and sky are the same colour
In flat light and cloud on snow, there is no horizon and no depth perception, and the usual techniques stop working.
Wild Places
Montane heath is the habitat above the tree line nobody names
The dwarf shrubs and lichen heaths of high plateaux are Arctic vegetation stranded at low latitude, and they are retreating.
Wild Places
Biological soil crust: the living skin a single footprint breaks
In dry country the ground itself is alive. It takes a very long time to form and moments to destroy.
Wild Places
Mangroves do three jobs at once, which is why losing them costs so much
Trees that live in salt water, hold a coastline together and raise fish for a living. Their value is only obvious once they are…
Wild Places
Kelp forests are a moving wall the coastline leans on
Underwater forests that grow at extraordinary speed, shelter whole communities and can vanish in a season when the balance shifts.
Wild Places
Cloud forest drinks from the air it stands in
A forest that intercepts water directly from mist can hold more moisture than the rainfall alone would allow, and it depends on a…
Wild Places
Permafrost thaw changes the shape of the ground itself
Frozen ground is a structural material. When it warms, the landscape above it subsides, slumps and reorganises in ways that are…